Acceleration for session oriented protocols, such as the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), requires an offload engine that is essentially a computer on the network interface card to offload the computing operations that would otherwise be required by the host device. The cost and performance benefits of an offload have been suspect at best. The offload engine copies packets to buffers at the application layer and that in turn requires every packet to be subjected to read and write operations. Copying the payload of packets to the application buffer utilizes the central processing unit. Higher central processing unit utilization is undesirable because it eventually results in lower throughput, limiting the availability of the central processing unit to application layer operations.